Twitter Poaches Google Exec to Be New Head in Germany

According to his Twitter profile, Twitter’s new Germany chief is excited about the digital future, is a Bayern Munich soccer fan, and loves bikram yoga — an intense, sweaty form of yoga practiced in a packed, heated room, much like the German online advertising market he’ll try break into.

The company, moving aggressively into mobile advertising, has poached a new chief for Germany from Google, signaling a new push to break into a market it has largely failed to sink roots into.

Thomas de Buhr, most recently Google’s Director of Branding for the German speaking countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, will start in August and focus on creating a sales team to target advertising agencies in Germany.

In his new job, de Buhr will try to convince German companies, only a handful of which have bought ads from Twitter, to use the site as an advertising tool. Germany is a fast growing market for online advertising with revenues of 1.32 billion Euros ($1.8 billion) in 2013 and a year over year growth rate of 9,3 %, according to the newest report of the Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft, a trade association for the German digital industry.

Twitter has fallen behind in mobile-ad revenue compared with other companies like Facebook and Google. According to eMarketer, Twitter’s share of the worldwide mobile ad market was just 2.4% last year. Facebook and Google, meanwhile, have more than two-thirds of the market.

Twitter’s current chief for Germany, Rowan Barnett, will continue as director of market development and media, where he aims to raise Twitter’s profile by encouraging media organizations, politicians, and celebrities to tweet.

By establishing separate teams for the two areas – sales and market development – Twitter will have the same organizational structure in Germany as in other countries, spokesman Dirk Hensen said. Up until now, Twitter hasn’t had a sales department in Germany, in contrast to Europe’s other two main markets, the U.K. and France.

The company opened its first office on German soil in May 2012 in Berlin and began offering promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts to selected testers in Germany several months later, but didn’t market them on a regular basis. Adidas, Deutsche Lufthansa and BMW are among the few that have advertised on Twitter – all via the London office.

Twitter’s popularity lags behind other social networks in Germany. Only 22% of participants in an online poll of news website operator Tomorrow Focus said they used Twitter in October. The figures for Facebook Inc. and YouTube were 83% and 52% respectively.

De Buhr tweets as @debuhrtho, but hasn’t been an overly active user of his future employer’s service. He published the first of his so far 25 tweets on Feb. 15. His team for advertising sales will be entirely new.

Correction: Barnett was previously director of market development and media. A previous version of this post incorrectly implied that this was a new role for him.